First opened Thursday, May 2, 2013
沼
ぬま
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
swamp, bog, pond
Numa appears to be 沼 (nu, “swamp”) plus 間 (ma, “space, area”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 沼
In a sentence
ここに小さな沼があります。
There is a small pond here.
その沼にはサギがたくさん住んでいる。
Lots of herons live in the marsh.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Appears to be a compound of 沼 (nu, “swamp”) + 間 (ma, “space, area”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 沼 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 沼 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ぬま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぬ
- “From Old Japanese. Root of the Old Japanese verb ぬる (nuru, “to become loose; to become wet”) and modern Japanese 濡れる (nureru, “to become wet”), adverb ぬるぬる (nurunuru, “loosely; lukewarmly; oozingly”).”
- “May be cognate with Korean 늪 (neup, “swamp, bog, marsh”), Ainu nup (“flat land, plain; fen”), Mongolian нам (nam, “low-lying”), намаг (namag, “swamp, bog, marsh”), норох (norox, “to become wet”).”
- “Generally only used in compounds in modern Japanese.”
しょう
- “/seu/ → /ɕeu/ → /ɕʲoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 沼 (tsyew^X, “swamp”). Compare modern Mandarin 沼 (zhǎo).”
- “Only ever used in compounds.”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.